


All That is Gold (Does Not Glitter)

by rosewiththorns



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Anaheim Ducks, Gen, Hurt and comfort, Kneeling, Kneeling verse, M/M, Non-Sexual Submission, mentoring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-05
Updated: 2014-09-05
Packaged: 2018-02-16 05:20:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2257293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosewiththorns/pseuds/rosewiththorns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the Olympics, Cam needs Scott to guide him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All That is Gold (Does Not Glitter)

**Author's Note:**

> I love the idea of a mild AU where younger players kneel to veterans so much that I've apparently expanded it to coaches...

“All that is gold does not glitter  
Not all who wander are lost;  
The old that is strong does not wither,  
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”—J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

All That Is Gold (Does Not Glitter) 

When he had accepted the assistant coach position with the Anaheim Ducks, Scott had figured that working with active NHL players—whether on the rise, in their peak, or staving off their inevitable decline—would help him feel young. It hadn’t taken him long, though, to realize that coaching had mostly just left him with an elevated gray hair count. 

There were good days, of course—when Sami absorbed a tip to avoid turning the puck over at the blueline when attempting to generate offense or when Hampus soaked up like a sponge a piece of advice about how to stay stronger on his skates during a board battle for puck possession, but, in keeping with the law of averages, there were also the bad days. Days such as today when he had the urge to phone every coach he’d ever had at any level to apologize profusely for any hairs he had prompted them to yank out the way Cam Fowler was causing him to long to tear out his. 

Everything Cam had done throughout today’s practice had lacked his characteristic quickness and deftness. In a nutshell, it had looked as if he was more worried about fighting the puck than playing with it. All that would have been fine—not good, but fine—because everybody, especially twenty-two-year-old defensemen, had days where limbs were clumsy and pucks obstinately refuse to bounce favorably. The problem was that Cam hadn’t even looked as if he were trying and vexed with his own failures. 

Instead, he had projected a vibe that suggested he didn’t much care about anything today, and Scott had spent entirely too much of practice experimenting with various methods of sparking his interest that had all failed to create any kind of reaction. Scott could speak sharply or softly and receive only an automatic nod that came either a beat too soon or too late to indicate genuine comprehension on Cam’s part. He could point at a spot on the ice and see Cam’s eyes locking a patch too far to the right or to the left to be truly focused on the lesson. He could diagram a drill on a whiteboard and know that Cam’s mind was directed a million miles away from the arrows. 

His inability to get through to Cam was especially aggravating because the kid had been Scott’s special, personal assignment ever since the Ducks had selected him twelfth overall in 2010. Scott saw so much of himself in Cam—the swift and smooth skating, the crisp stick work and passing, and the reliance on brains over brawn—that he didn’t know whether that made him harder or easier on Cam. He just knew that he wanted to guide Cam along the path to becoming the best defenseman he could be, but that meant that Cam had to listen to him. 

Deciding that a jolt of caffeine would hardly be unwelcome at the present, Scott rattled the carafe of coffee the players and coaches kept in their lounge. Since every drop of coffee usually was swallowed at least a half hour before practice, he anticipated it to be empty and was rather astonished to discover that it was half full. Grabbing a paper cup from the stack, he poured coffee into it, his hands informing him as they encircled the cup that the burgundy beverage was more cold than lukewarm. 

“You wanted to speak to me?” asked Cam, who had apparently finished showering and changing into street clothes, from the lounge’s doorway. 

“Yes.” Scott nodded him inside and sighed. He could tell from the anxious, youthful face before him that Cam translated “speak” into a coaching euphemism for yelling, but he had no intention of shouting. After all, he had never been much of a screamer, and, ultimately, his goal was to teach Cam, not judge him. 

Waving a palm at the carafe, Scott went on, “Do you want some coffee? There’s still about half the container left.” 

“No, thank you.” Cam shook his head, and Scott took that as a sign Cam wasn’t too tired, since Cam typically succumbed to the temptation of caffeine only when he was functioning a notch below exhausted. 

“A wise choice.” Scott swirled the amber liquid around in his cup and then began to lift it toward his lips. “This stuff feels stone-cold.” 

“It’s also spiced with Tabasco sauce compliments of Corey Perry,” remarked Cam, and Scott’s hand froze around his coffee cup with just enough time to stop him from taking a sip. 

“I’ll pass, too, then.” Noting inwardly that Corey’s prank must be why there was any coffee left in the lounge at this time, Scott dumped his drink down the sink and tossed the cup into the recycling bin. “We’ll just take a coffee break without the coffee. How are you doing, Cam?” 

“All right.” Cam shrugged, and Scott knew that Lisa would say Cam didn’t look all right with his ashen cheeks and the swollen purple rings under his eyes. 

“Everything is fine with your family and Jasmine?” pressed Scott, naming Cam’s girlfriend and high school sweetheart. 

“Yeah.” Cam nodded. “Everyone is doing great.” 

Scott hesitated. He was well-aware that he was about to start prying, but, once you took someone into your home---concerned yourself with his nutrition, taught him how to wash his clothes, and made sure the oil in his car got changed—the responsibility lingered. You couldn’t cease worrying and caring about somebody just because of a change in address. Maybe the protective urges even increased if you weren’t around to monitor the person’s welfare as much. “Have you been eating properly? I mean, all the food groups, not just cookie dough ice cream, chocolate milk, and Cinnamon Toast Crunch?” 

He had hoped that Cam’s mouth would twist into a sheepish grin, but instead Cam’s lips thinned and barely managed to shape out a flat response. “I haven’t really been that hungry lately.” 

“Are you feeling sick?” Scott wanted there to be a rational experience for Cam’s sluggish behavior at practice, and he supposed that it might have been too much for the franchise to hope all of its Olympians would return from Sochi’s comparatively primitive sanitation without some ailment. 

“No.” Cam shook his head. “I’m not going to throw up all over the rug or anything.” 

“Jet lag?” suggested Scott, thinking that it wouldn’t shock him if Cam’s internal clock was three or four time zones off after being in Russia for two weeks. 

“Not too bad.” Again, Cam shook his head. “Traveling west isn’t as taxing as traveling east. It’s easier to gain time than to lose it.” 

Scott felt as if there was something else wrong with Cam, but he couldn’t point a finger at it, so he said in a tone that he intended to convey that Cam could approach him with any problems or questions, “Is there anything else you want to talk to me about, Cam?” 

Cam opened his mouth to speak, seemed to reconsider whatever he was about to share, and snapped his lips shut again with a silent headshake. 

“Then I don’t understand your poor performance in practice today.” As his words and annunciation hardened, Scott could feel a fist of impatience clenching around his heart that he struggled to relax. This meeting, he reminded himself sternly, wasn’t about reprimanding Cam. It was about helping him mature into the complete defenseman he had been drafted to be, and when a player messed up, a coach had to examine how much he was accountable for the error. After all, plenty of successful NHL players couldn’t effectively impart their experience to the next generation of hockey players. Gretzky, for instance, had probably instructed the bewildered Coyote forwards on more occasions than they could count to play where the puck was going to be, not where it was, and none of them had attained even a fraction of his greatness. Scott didn’t wish to waste his breath or his players’ time by sounding like that. “Is there something you need to have explained in a different way?” 

“No.” Cam massaged his temples. “It wasn’t anything you did or said that confused me. I just couldn’t focus.” 

“You weren’t paying attention?” Scott frowned, and his forehead furrowed. Far from being banked at this rueful admission, the fire of his temper was fanned. Cam was supposed to be the go-to defenseman Anaheim could rely on to remain poised in all situations. He wasn’t allowed to just lose focus like an eighteen-year-old rookie. “In other words, you just decided not to listen to me today?” 

“I wasn’t trying to be rude or anything.” Cam’s eyes sank toward the spirals of the carpet. “It sounds bad when you phrase it like that.” 

“That’s because it is bad,” snapped Scott. Cam was a polite young man from a nice family who wouldn’t go out of his way to be disrespectful to anyone, but that didn’t mean Scott had to approve of the same flakiness he had been accused of demonstrating throughout his early career as a Devil. Now that he was coaching he saw how that trademark inconstancy could be perceived as laziness and why Jacques Lemaire had exploded like a grenade over something a youthful Scott had defined as not that big a deal. 

Temporarily unable to face someone who resembled his past self too much for comfort, he spun on his heel and strode over to a sofa, where he sat down with a sigh of upholstery. “I don’t speak just to hear myself talk. Now, come over here.” He jabbed a finger at the floor in front of the couch. “Let’s finish our discussion.” 

He had intended for Cam to sit beside him or possibly stand in front of the sofa, so his jaw almost dropped to the rug when Cam knelt before him. Cam hadn’t knelt since he was a rookie, and Scott was on the verge of ordering him up when he remembered how he would kneel for Scott Stevens and Ken Daneyko long after his rookie year was over and he craved the stability only a grizzled veteran could provide. 

Since Cam was expected to be Anaheim’s number one defenseman, he had nobody except Scott to turn to when he had the compulsion to humble himself. Scott could imagine how a twenty-two-year-old such as Cam could find being an anchor on the blueline so heavy that he had to sink sometimes, and Scott had promised himself years ago that he would be there as often as possible to save Cam from drowning in those dangerous undertows. 

“Why are we here, Cam?” Scott made his tone milder but still tried to emphasize through his inflection that he would brook no nonsense. 

“Because you’re angry at me,” responded Cam in a hushed voice. 

Pinching the bridge of his nose, Scott recalled abruptly how the unpredictability that had so irked Jacques Lemaire hadn’t been deliberate defiance or impertinence. As a defenseman breaking into the league, there had just been transcendent moments when he had acted apart from himself as the game took him over, dictating his actions so thoroughly that he didn’t even know what he was doing. The bigger the game, the more likely it was to conquer him, so he had always been a playoff performer. Only later in his career had he mastered the art of dominating a game instead of submitting to it. When Cam learned the same lesson, he would become a practically unstoppable force. Until then, he required a mixture of patience and firmness to help him flourish. 

“Anger has no place here.” Scott squeezed Cam’s shoulder. “This is about discipline, not punishment.” 

When Cam bowed his head in acknowledgment of this correction, Scott continued, “Tell me why we are here.” 

“No idea.” Cam’s chin rose in what might have been rebellion. “You’re the one who wanted to speak to me.” 

“Unacceptable answer.” Scott rapped the crown of Cam’s forehead gently with his knuckles to make it clear that he was in charge of moderating this conversation. “Try again.” 

Flushing to the tips of his earlobes, Cam mumbled, “I didn’t listen to you in practice.” 

“Better.” Scott offered a brief nod of approval even as he noted inwardly that pulling useful information out of defensemen could be more painful than extracting teeth. “Why wouldn’t you listen to me?” 

Biting his lip, Cam paused for a minute in which Scott didn’t pressure him to speak, and then he replied in a voice thick as molasses, “I was thinking about the Olympics.” 

With the inertia of a wrecking ball slamming into a condemned edifice, Scott remembered how unraveled the American squad had looked by the final buzzer of their last game against Finland. No wonder Cam was shaken after that experience. 

“Name the one thing you’d most like to re-do from the Olympics,” commanded Scott, determined to transform what Cam regarded as a monumental failure into at worst a minor and fixable mistake. 

“Just one?” Cam echoed, his nose wrinkling dubiously. 

“You talk as if you were some defensive disaster, and you weren’t.” For a second, Scott smiled and then went on seriously, “Name the one mistake you’d most like to have back. Take all the time you need to think, but the next time you speak, I want to hear an answer to my question, not you asking one of your own.” 

Cam’s forehead knotted and his eyes glazed over, so Scott knew that he was sifting through the quicksand of his memory for his most shameful Olympic episode. Finally, Cam muttered, “In the Canada game when the clock was winding down, I messed up pinching the puck, causing a turnover that Carlson barely prevented from going into our net.” 

“Defense partners are meant to cover for one another.” Scott tried to lend perspective to the situations, since he had lost track of the number of times that guys like Stevens, Daneyko, and Pronger had bailed him out over the years. “Your big gaffe didn’t even result in a goal against.” 

“Yeah, but, at that point in the game, I was out there to help our team score.” Cam’s jaw tightened. “I didn’t succeed at that.” 

“You did very well with that in the Finland match, though.” Scott ruffled Cam’s hair. “In that game, you created plenty of quality scoring chances.” 

“None of them mattered.” Cam shook his head. “By that time, the game had already been lost.” 

“The goal you scored against Russia certainly mattered.” Scott grinned. “That was a beauty. You picked your spot perfectly.” 

Finally, this drew a slight smile out of Cam. “Yeah, that was pretty exciting. I’ll probably remember it all my life.” Silence fell between them for a moment, and then Cam added in an awkward rush, “Sorry about not listening you, and thanks for listening to me.” 

“Any time.” Scott clapped Cam’s shoulder. “Lisa’s making enchiladas for dinner tonight if you want to drop by.” 

Cam’s face brightened by forty watts. “I suppose I could find time for my favorite meal…”


End file.
